Daily Archives: September 15, 2019

It’s impossible to ignore the fact that we live in the Age of Hedonism. An age in which people’s lives, or at least the fictitious online manifestation of them, seems to be dedicated primarily to the obsessive pursuit of pleasure with no attempt at restraint. That the 2008-09 global financial crisis not only failed to contain this excess but perhaps even amplified it is all the more surprising and unprecedented. In 2009, the cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote about “capitalist realism”, the idea that capitalism had so permeated every aspect of our existence that we have been unable to imagine a future without it. One can easily argue that our cultural self-indulgence, so tied in with capitalism’s image of how we must look, think, and behave, is part of this phenomenon, producing the contradiction that the more individualistic we are made to be, the more we become like everyone else.

To me, one of the most visible manifestations of how the Age of Hedonism is upon us is the rise in popularity of music festivals. Granted, music festivals are hardly new, but it’s the “festival culture” that is now inescapably attached to it that is more notorious. It seems that festivals are less about the music nowadays and more about the “experience”, this being the pleasure in dressing in obnoxious boho chic, rave, or cybergoth outfits, behaving equally obnoxiously and taking as many pictures of oneself as possible. In a sense, festivals are now three-day long fancy dress or stag/hen parties, music be dammed. By far the most egregious offender is Burning Man, which nowadays resembles a hyper-sexualized Mad Max carnival filled not with marauding gangs but very affluent tech bros and Instagram influencers. If capitalism has ever had its greatest cultural victory, it is by perverting the original intention of this festival from an experience in communal self-reliance, to an orgy of Silicon Valley excess. Continue reading →